Tom Harris, also known as The Hill Country Gardener, is a Master Gardener certified by the State of Texas, a Master Pruner certified by the San Antonio Botanical Garden, and a founder and volunteer for the Gardening Volunteers of South Texas (GVST).

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Sweet Potatoes

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an 11-pound sweet potato or not, but I dug one up last year as I was getting the last of my sweet potatoes out of the ground. It’s about as big around as a basketball and about twice as long…great big sucker. And, believe it or not, when my wife cooks them, they’re really sweet. She has to slice it into 1 inch pieces before she cooks it and all she does is bake it at 350 degrees for about an hour (or until a fork goes in easily) and add butter…sweet as candy.

I highly recommend that you try some next year. All you have to do is pick one up at the grocery store about next February or so and let it set until it starts to sprout. Pull off each sprout and place it in a shallow bowl of water until it puts on roots and then plant it. You’ll need plenty of room because the vines grow all over the place. You also need very loose soil for it to grow in. In about 4 months you dig them up and VIOLA, you’ve got yourself some sweet ‘taters, bubba. Some folks call ‘em yams but they’re really the same thing.

One little warning, however, about sweet potatoes; i.e., be prepared for that bed to have sweet potatoes in it from now on because they’ll come back year after year. This is the sixth year for mine.

Citrus Fruits

Also, I’ve been eating quite a few of those Changsha mandarin oranges (like tangerines) these last few weeks. Now the grapefruits are starting to enlarge and get ripe. My neighbor Ron and I picked one the other day just to see what’s happening with them.

I was greatly surprised to find that it’s kinda sweet. I’d never tasted a grapefruit that was sweet before. When I was growing up in northern Oklahoma, all the grapefruit and oranges that we got were small, bitter and sour…probably the culls from down here someplace…”Send ‘em up to those Okies, they’ll eat anything.” As a result, I never developed a taste for citrus fruit.

But now that I’m growing my own and they get ripe on the tree, there’s just a world of difference. If you have room for a citrus tree or two, lemme know and I’ll let you know what varieties to get and where to buy them. They’re not much trouble and they sure do make it worth the wait for the fruit…another of those wonderful gifts that comes from hard work and patience. The flowers alone are worth the investment.

Die Back

By now, you probably have lot of stuff that has died back to the ground since that last freeze we had. You have a choice as to whether or not you cut it back. You can cut it back now if you really want to, but doing that deprives the birds and other critters a place to hide, nest, or whatever. On the other hand, if you cut it back now, it looks a lot neater and you get to clean up all around the area. It’s your call.

Mistletoe is a Parasite

Now that the leaves are thinning out or gone, you can see the mistletoe in your trees. This is a good time to harvest the mistletoe from your trees. It is a parasite and will kill the branch it’s located on from the point of attachment on out to the end of the limb, so cut the limb off about 12 inches below the mistletoe on the tree-side. Don’t just knock it off because it’ll just come right back.

Gardening Classes Start in January

The Gardening Volunteers of South Texas (GVST) will start offering their monthly Essentials of Gardening classes beginning in January at the Garden Center at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. I’ll be hosting all the classes and teaching several of them. The topics aren’t all nailed down yet, so if you have any special topics you like to see and hear, let us know and we’ll see about scheduling them for the spring series. Just write to me with your ideas and I’ll forward them to the right person.

The classes start at 12:15 pm and go to 3:15 or so one day per month–on the third Monday of each month. You don’t have to be an experienced gardener to attend the classes–they’re open to anyone who wants to come. In fact, the lady who puts them together told me just today that we’ll probably get back to some of the basics in the classes this spring as well as providing some more advanced training in the latter sessions. So you see there’s something for everybody.

In addition, my spring schedule if classes is now set. I’ll be teaching classes in Boerne, Kerrville, and 2 places in San Antonio. Check out the schedule on page 5 of my web site.

Here’s hoping you and yours have a very merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.

Send your comments and/or questions to gardener@gvtc.com or see the website at www.thehillcountrygardener.com.